Sunday, October 30, 2005

Let's make Australia a nuclear waste dump!

Bob Hawke's suggestion last month that Australia should offer itself as the solution to the world's nuclear waste storage problem has, naturally, fired some controversy. As Christopher Pearson said at the time, "Some will say that Hawke was just floating an unsaleable idea on a whim or, as one green activist put it, saying something outrageous because he was suffering from relevance-deprivation syndrome. I think he meant exactly what he said, and it was a premeditated and well-timed intervention into a national debate that was in danger of going nowhere."

Hawke's proposal has been taken seriously. An ABC-Radio podcast at Ockham's Razor hosts a physicist going through the reasons why, as a friend who sent me the link says, "the Aussies would be mugs NOT to allow a nuclear waste storage facility to be built inland from Perth." Says the physicist, it would be in Australians' self-interest. Feel free to comment.